Cold Harbor (The Gibson Vaughn Series Book 3)

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  The two men, standing on the lonely runway, their wild hair dancing in the wind, must have been a strange sight. Loose snow tumbled across the runway as they stared each other down like defanged gunslingers. In the early days of his imprisonment, Gibson had dreamed of what he’d do if he ever saw him again. But as time had passed, he’d felt less and less about Charles Merrick. His father had argued that the man was an animal and had done what animals do when cornered. It would be foolish to expect anything different; the blame belonged elsewhere. With those who should have known better. With the CIA and the man who called himself Damon Washburn.

  “You!” Merrick’s voice echoed off the trees that ringed the airfield.

  Trees . . . Gibson realized where he had been delivered. It had been spring the last time he’d seen this place, so he hadn’t recognized it now. He was back in West Virginia—Dule Tree Airfield. The CIA had dumped the pair at the very place where they’d taken them, God only knew how long ago. Six months? A year and a half? Longer? What had happened to warrant their release? His mind didn’t feel capable of solving that particular riddle. More than that, he didn’t care. He was free and could think of a lot of places he’d rather be than standing on a runway with Charles Merrick, contemplating the implications of his release.

  Actually, there was only one place he wanted to be. One person he wanted to see. Ellie. How old was his daughter now? How many birthdays had he missed? The question snapped him from his inertia. Without a word, he slung his duffel bag over a shoulder and turned his back on Charles Merrick. He had no use for the man. At the edge of the runway, he scrabbled over the snowbank and set off across the field for the airfield’s office and perhaps a phone. The snow was knee-high, and it took exaggerated steps to break through the icy shell. Badly out of shape, he labored across the field with his heart and breath hammering in his ears. Duke walked behind in the path Gibson had cut through the snow. His father began to sing:

  “Sire, the night is darker now,

  And the wind blows stronger,

  Fails my heart, I know not how;

  I can go no—”

  “Shut up, Dad.”

  Every so often Duke would get to singing. If Gibson didn’t nip it in the bud, it could go on awhile, and he was in no mood for Christmas carols. He needed to get gone from this place. Away from Charles Merrick. It didn’t occur to him that Charles Merrick might feel differently.

  Merrick tackled him from behind and sent him sprawling. The two men struggled in the snow, Merrick keening, “You . . . you . . . you . . .” As if he had much more to say but didn’t know where to begin. The rage in his voice said enough. Gibson wriggled free of Merrick’s grasp and tried to stand up in the deep snow. Merrick crawled after him and pulled him back down just as he got his feet under him. The two men wrestled again—a feeble, slapstick version of a fight. After so long in captivity, both men tired quickly. They gave up and lay there in the snow, panting and holding on to each other like castaways.

  Bear stood nearby with a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring under one arm, head cocked to the side, watching Gibson. So thin that she didn’t break through the snow but stood atop it like an angel. Her gossamer sundress fluttered in the wind, and her feet were bare; Gibson worried that she’d catch her death. She balanced the book on her head and put her arms out as if on a tightrope.

  “It’s time to go home,” she said. “Ellie is waiting.”

  Gibson nodded happily, tears in his eyes. “I didn’t know if I’d see you again.”

  “You’re silly,” Bear answered.

  “You’re going to wish you hadn’t,” Merrick said, not seeing Bear and assuming Gibson meant him.

  “Are you coming?” Bear asked.

  Gibson pushed Merrick off. Merrick rolled onto his back and lay there wheezing. Gibson stood and brushed off the snow. He looked around for Bear, but she was nowhere in sight. She’d gone on ahead. Good. He hoped she found someplace warm. He fetched his bag, keeping a wary eye on Merrick in case he caught a second wind.

  “You did this,” Merrick moaned.

  Gibson didn’t have the energy or inclination to argue the point. Merrick didn’t matter to him. All that mattered was getting home to his daughter. He left Merrick in the snow and trudged toward the airfield’s office. He tried the door—locked. No hours posted at the door. Gibson peered through the window but didn’t see a clock in the gloom. Based on the sun, it couldn’t be much after dawn. It was far too cold to wait around to see if anyone showed up to work. If this was a Sunday, he could be waiting a long time. His eyes fell on an office phone; he could call his ex-wife and let her know he was on his way. But that would mean breaking in. Jeopardizing his newfound freedom by committing such a pedestrian crime seemed foolish. He had a far bigger crime in mind. The one he and his father had planned together.

  He cast one last look toward Charles Merrick, who lay motionless in the snow. Maybe he’d had a heart attack. Gibson hoped not. He wanted the disgraced ex-billionaire to live a long, penniless life. That would be the best revenge of all.

  With that cheery thought to warm him, Gibson started down the airfield’s dirt road for home.

  CHAPTER THREE

  At the bottom of the hill, Gibson paused beside the “Dule Tree Airfield” sign to consider his options. Looking up and down the road, he couldn’t see any signs of human life. If his memory served, and he didn’t know that it did, the airfield was pretty damned isolated. So which way to go? Left or right? Right led back to the town of Niobe. It would take more than a day on foot. No one would pick him up looking like a deranged mountain man. Besides, Niobe held a lot of bad memories, and he didn’t know that he’d be welcomed there.

  Left it was. It felt better to be moving toward home and his daughter, forward not backward, and perhaps he’d get lucky and stumble upon a town.

  The conditions made for slow going—snow had been plowed high onto the shoulders, where it had melted and refrozen into sharp white teeth. That meant walking along the edge of the icy road in sneakers. After a tractor trailer sent him sprawling onto the snowbank for safety, he crossed the road and walked against traffic so at least he’d get a good look at the vehicle that killed him. The wind strengthened as he walked, funneled through the gully between the woods to either side of the road. Gibson leaned into the wind, eyes watering. After a quarter mile he couldn’t feel his face. He stopped, shivering uncontrollably, and put on every shirt in his duffel bag. With a Marine Corps T-shirt, he fashioned a crude keffiyeh to cover his neck, mouth, and nose. He zipped the windbreaker up tight, tucked his hands up into the sleeves, and set off again. He looked ridiculous, but it would slow the creep of hypothermia.

  Around the bend, he caught up with Bear, who stood under a tree reading her book. Her dress fluttered in the wind.

  “Aren’t you freezing?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” she assured him. “Walk with me?”

  They walked side by side. Neither spoke, but her company helped keep him going even as he felt himself weakening. An aching hunger and thirst constricted his throat. Maybe if he lay down in the snow, he’d wake up back in his cell? There’d be food waiting for him; he’d never wanted one of those bars more in his life. Funny the things you found yourself missing.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Bear said, reading his mind.

  “I’m tired.”

  “You slept on the plane.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Ellie’s all you’ve talked about. You can’t quit now.”

  At the mention of his daughter’s name, Gibson felt ashamed. For all the pleasure it had brought to plot revenge on Damon Washburn, it had been Ellie who had kept him alive. Seeing her again was the only hope that captivity hadn’t stolen, yet he already wanted to take the easy way out. He lowered his head and shuffled forward until he became hypnotized by the progress of his feet. He couldn’t feel them anymore, so it reassured him to see them hard at work.

  When he looked up again,
he saw modest houses set back from the road. He should ask for help, but the idea of knocking on any of the doors terrified him. It would mean talking, and not to someone like Bear or his father who understood what he’d been through. The people inside these houses would see only a madman in a windbreaker. Or mistake him for an escaped convict, which he supposed wasn’t too far from the truth. There had been a time when persuading people had been second nature to him, but now he couldn’t remember how. What would he say to them? How would he even begin?

  Duke Vaughn leaned against an old Ford pickup truck with a “For Sale” sign in the window. His dead father beckoned to him, and Gibson went up the driveway. Bear had vanished again. She and his father avoided crossing paths, he’d noticed. They didn’t seem to get along so well these days.

  “I can’t do this,” he told his father, eying the home’s front door.

  “You know how many doors I’ve knocked on in my career? Asking perfect strangers to vote for my candidate?”

  Gibson shook his head. “Looking like this?”

  Duke conceded the point. “I’m not saying you don’t have certain liabilities. You used to like a challenge.”

  “It’s not a challenge. It’s an impossibility.”

  “Most people would say Damon Washburn is impossible. But we’re going to do that too. But first, you have to knock on this door.”

  “What do I say?”

  “How much cash do you have?” Duke asked.

  Gibson didn’t know. He leafed through his wallet and counted ten crisp twenties. He didn’t remember having them when he’d been captured. A gift from the CIA? Mighty generous of them to give him severance pay for time served. Not that two hundred dollars would take him very far. He still had his credit cards, but they would have been frozen for nonpayment a long time ago. He looked at the clean-cut kid on his driver’s license with a feeling close to nostalgia. It was valid until his birthday in 2021. He wondered if it had expired.

  Gibson caught his reflection in the window of the truck. Unwinding the T-shirt from around his head, he considered the man staring back at him, foreign and familiar in equal measures. The face of a vagrant, feral and adrift. But at least he finally had an answer to the question that had tormented him. He was still him. Such as it was. But it wasn’t a face you opened your front door to. He looked unfit for human company. The hollow sockets of his eyes were the red of septic bandages. His beard unfolded like a tangled thicket to his chest, and his long, matted hair fell to his shoulders. Gibson attempted to comb some discipline into it, but his hair felt like barbed wire on his blue-black fingers.

  “Doubt a couple hundred bucks is enough to get you this sweet baby.” Duke winked and patted the pickup. “But who knows, maybe they’re in the mood to negotiate. Just give ’em that old Vaughn charm.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that’ll work wonders.”

  “That’s the spirit.” Lately, his dad acknowledged sarcasm only when it suited him.

  Gibson went up the walk to the front door, debating whether he’d make a worse impression with a T-shirt wrapped around his head or in full Sasquatch mode. In the end, he left off the T-shirt, opened the glass storm door, and rang the bell. A boy no older than eight threw open the inner door. A wall of heat greeted Gibson, making his face tingle. The boy wore a tank top and shorts and looked up at Gibson from under a Cincinnati Bengals helmet.

  “You don’t look so good.”

  From the mouths of babes.

  Gibson opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He pointed at the pickup. The door closed, and Gibson heard the boy hollering for someone.

  “You’re going to have to do better than pointing at things, Tarzan,” Duke said.

  “I’m working on it.”

  A woman in her fifties, clutching a bathrobe at the neck, came to the door, makeup half done. She opened the door an economical crack, gave him a once-over, and asked his business. Gibson stood there in mute panic, mind a blank. Despite the cold, sweat rolled down the back of his neck. The woman’s eyes narrowed, and she started to close the door when her eyes fell on the T-shirt in his hand.

  “You a Marine?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Use your words,” Duke said.

  “Sing me the hymn,” she said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “You heard me. And don’t be giving me no Halls of Montezuma neither, just skip on down to the third verse.”

  He knew it. Every Marine did. They could have left him in that cell until his brains were scrambled eggs, until he couldn’t remember his own name, and he’d still know every word to the hymn. But the idea of saying so much petrified him. He opened his mouth and shut it again.

  “I ain’t got all day,” she said.

  “You can do it,” Duke encouraged.

  Gibson cleared his throat and rasped out, “Here’s health to you and to our Corps. Which we are proud to serve; In many a strife we’ve fought for life. And never lost our nerve. If the—”

  “All right, that’ll do.” Her expression softened. “What do you need, son?”

  “Home,” he managed.

  She nodded as if she knew exactly where he meant. “I let you inside . . . you going to do something stupid? Cause me to shoot you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then take your shoes off and come warm up.”

  “You did it,” Duke said, exulting. “This is the first step, son. I’m proud of you.”

  He didn’t share his father’s enthusiasm and felt like a kid who’d won a trophy simply for showing up.

  She led him down a hall to the kitchen, where he sat at a small table, luxuriating in the warmth of the house. She brought him a glass of water and a banana. He gulped the water and devoured the banana; the smell of the peel made him want to cry, the first real food he’d seen in who knew how long. She took the glass and refilled it for him. The boy danced into the kitchen, football helmet swaying loosely on his head. He spiked an imaginary football and dashed out again.

  “I need that boy back in school already.” The woman chuckled. “He’s going a little stir-crazy.”

  Gibson nodded—a topic he knew intimately. He’d been that kind of kid himself at that age. Ellie had inherited it from him. Her idea of sitting still was running in circles.

  “Ma’am, what’s the date?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Well . . . you must have tied one on tight. Don’t know the date. It’s December 26.”

  He’d wanted to know the year but feared that would be a bridge too far. He’d missed Christmas with Ellie by one day. One last fuck-you from the CIA. Well, Ellie and he could still celebrate. It wasn’t too late for that. What child wouldn’t leap at a second Christmas morning?

  “My name is Cheryl.”

  Gibson hesitated. “John,” he said. He didn’t know why he’d needed to lie to her.

  “So where is home, John?”

  “Virginia. Near DC. I have enough money for a bus ticket if I can get to Morgantown.”

  She refilled his water while she thought that over. “Can’t be driving you to Morgantown. I’m on shift at eleven.”

  “I understand. I appreciate your—”

  “But maybe I could drop you at the truck stop up on the I-79. You could hitch from there.”

  Gibson nodded gratefully. She left him alone in the kitchen and went to finish getting ready for work. He got up to refill his water glass, stood over the sink and drank it down, and then filled it for a fourth time. The clock on the microwave read “9:42.” It was 9:42 a.m. on December 26. Such mundane information, but it felt like an important gateway between the netherworld he’d been in and this place. Tempting to call it the real world, but he held off, at least for now. He still harbored doubts.

  On the far wall hung a framed photograph of a young woman at attention in her dress blues. He raised his glass to her.

  Semper Fi.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Cheryl dropped him at the truck stop and refused the money he tried to give h
er for gas. He thanked her and shook her hand when she offered it. Her hand was strong, skin worn and calloused. His first human contact. It reawakened a sense of belonging to the land of the living. A profound difference for a man whose cell had been his whole world.

  Inside the door of the mini-mart stood a rack of newspapers. Gibson picked up a copy of the Charleston Gazette-Mail and saw the year. Eighteen months. They’d kept him in that cell for eighteen months. He would have believed had it been eighteen years. However long it had been, it felt like a lifetime. How would he begin to explain it to Nicole? He’d missed two of Ellie’s birthdays. His daughter was nine. He was thirty-one. That his confinement could have lasted much, much longer offered scant comfort now.

  “How do you think Damon Washburn celebrated his birthday?” Duke asked, leaning against the counter. “Bet he threw himself one hell of a party.”

  The thought of it burned.

  Gibson bought the newspaper and a tall bottle of water. He had the woman at the counter run his credit card, but as he suspected, it came back declined. Connected to the mini-mart was a simple restaurant; he seated himself and put twenty dollars on the table so the waitress would see that he could pay. The menu was a single laminated page, but it overwhelmed Gibson. Accustomed to eating the same food for every meal, he didn’t know how to choose for himself. How did something so simple become a life-or-death decision? When the waitress came around, nose wrinkled in distaste, he pointed blindly at the menu and held it up for her to see.

  She took the menu and brought him a double cheeseburger. He ate it too fast and gave himself a stomachache. But like a dog that didn’t know when it was full, he ordered a second. Waiting, he read the newspaper front to back, and, even though it contained mostly local stories, it represented one more delicate strand tethering him to the world. Over the newspaper, he studied the truckers at the surrounding tables, looking for a kind face. Either none of them had kind faces or else he’d forgotten what one looked like.